RUDAK Information
RUDAK Status and Telemetry:
RUDAK is the digital module aboard the AMSAT AO-40 satellite (pre launch name was P3d). For general information about RUDAK and AO-40 see www.amsat.org.
RUDAK STATUS: The current status of the RUDAK module can be found here.
RUDAK Telemetry Summary: The telemetry from RUDAK is described in this document.
RUDCOEFX.: The coefficients used to turn the raw telemetry data sent from the satellite into the engineering units (meaningful measurements) are found in this text document You can download that file from this page or from www.amsat.org. The file is designed to be read into telemetry decoding software. Parameters are positional. Updates will appear here and on www.amsat.org. Any software for decoding and displaying RUDAK telemetry should be designed to read that file to allow the end user to do updates without having to obtain a new release of the program.
Receive and Transmit antennas at WD0E
WD0E S downlink and L uplink dishes: Some views of the 4.5' S and L band dishes in use at WD0E for RUDAK 9k6 receive and transmit.
S Signal Source for Testing
Here is a $5 source for a very weak signal source on 2.4Ghz. Real simple, one afternoon project. Works great for aligning feeds on dishes and tuning other antennas for S band. Some pictures and notes.
RUDAK Whole Orbit Data:
Whole Orbit Data (WOD): The first look at one orbit worth of temperatures from the CAN/LAN nodes in AO-40. This is a binary file of WOD.
Chart of WOD: A quickly assembled chart of this first WOD from RUDAK. This chart was created by running the file above through a WOD extractor/decoder by Paul, KB5MU, importing the resulting text file into Excel, then graphing the results.
Text output from WOD extractor/decoder: The file of the decoded WOD. This file contains the temperature data for all the sensors on the CAN/LAN as extracted from the file above. Note that two are not operative (their values are in excess of 100 degrees in one case and negative in the other). The housekeeping task in RUDAK (PHTX) will be modified at some point so those inop points are not collected. You can import this file into your favorite spread sheet program and produce interesting charts showing how these temperatures change over an orbit.
WOD Format Information:
The format of the header is:
4 bytes, start time as DOS time_t
4 bytes, stop time as DOS time_t
2 bytes collection interval in seconds. In the example it is 0x3C or decimal 60 seconds
1 byte number of channels. In the example file it is 0x10 or decimal 16 channels
n bytes channel list. n = number of channels above. In the example the channels are from 0x2F to 0x3E. These channels correspond to those in the RUDCOEFX file.
The data section follows. Each channel is two bytes. Channels are in order as they appear in the channel list. The channel list order may not be the same as the coefficient file order. In the example channel 2E with a value of 0x0268 is followed by channel 30 with a value of 0x0231 etc. The remainder of the data for the channels in the list follows. After channel 3E the data for channel 2F 60 seconds later is stored, followed by channel 30, etc. You must calculate the time stamps for each sample set after the first using the start time and the interval. The calculated time stamp for the last sample should equal the stop time in the header (within one interval).
Jim White
last update 8/3/2001